I deleted all of my email filters

> I unsubscribe to everything I do not absolutely need.

This right here is one of the greatest quality-of-life improvements I ever adopted. Every single email you get, if you don’t absolutely want it, find and click the unsubscribe link in the footer.

(Standard disclaimer, don’t click links in spam. Only do this for senders who got your address through some kind of legitimate purchase or account sign-up.)

Each time you buy something, and they send you that first “hey why not buy something else too?“ message, unsubscribe. It takes a bit of discipline, but it pays dividends.

It is possible to get to a point where you hardly receive any mail. You can get to inbox zero doing this. It’s genuinely refreshing.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse of other people’s inboxes and, my god, I can’t imagine going back to that life.

At some point email went from a true communication avenue to just “sending this for reference”. Apps and services are adding their own notification inboxes and comment threads (or activity logs) and @-mentions as an interaction pattern so that they can enrich and embed communication in the context of what they do.

I won’t go so far as to say that email is dying, but it’s certainly changing in purpose.

My problem isn't spam emails, it's transactional emails that are just a bit too chatty nowadays. I can't buy anything online without getting 5 different emails, it seems. Or 20 online check-in reminders for flights. Often, I feel like "yes, I know that I just did thing X, you don't have to remind me".

Don't use filter rules to sort mail; after unsubscribing from everything you possibly can, use filter rules to even more aggressively auto-delete or block stuff that you really don't need to see.

You should end up getting so few emails that it's easy to read them all in one inbox or folder and subsequently reply, take a note, and manually delete them to get back to zero.

With Proton’s catch-all and sieve filters, I’ve simplified my method to the following:

* Every company I interact with gets a different email alias (no tags - company@mydomain.com)

* Every company gets a category tag (Finances, Travel, Entertainment, etc)

* Every category gets a folder by importance (finances are Important, travel is Somewhat Important, Entertainment is Not Important), with different retention periods (forever, 1 year, 1 month)

It’s a simple model that only requires me to put my alias in one of the rules on first receipt.

For unwieldy senders, like Klaviyo (one of their users spammed me more-than-daily and their CS was of no use), I set up a reject sieve filter literally telling them to fuck off. The emails did stop after a while, I think they got the message.

Well that only works for personal email unfortunately. In a corporate environment you often don't have an ability to unsubscribe from unwanted mail like those mandatory trainings or production alerts

I also have no filters. But I don't use Gmail tabbed inbox, either. Do people know you can disable this? I ask because "forfeiting agency to their algorithm" doesn't make sense to me. It sounds like the author isn't familiar with the product.

In addition to aggressively unsubscribing, I keep two simple filters that prevent emails from getting to my inbox:

- Only the inbox triggers email notifications, so I get very few (mostly from real people)

- The "unsubscribe" filter catches most non-important emails

- The "boring sender" filter catches about 20% more non-important emails

It takes a few seconds to scan the subjects of the non-important emails, then mark them as all as read with two keypresses.

More details: https://blog.leftium.com/2023/11/automatic-inbox-cleanup-wit...

I agree with the article 100%. There are still emails you can't unsubscribe from and shouldn't report as spam or block, for example your monthly bank statement email. It's sad that you can't turn these off as the bank is required to send them. For these cases I do set a "send to trash" rule. If using iCloud, note that rules you set locally on your Mac only run if the Mac is on. To have them run on the server they need to be set on iCloud Mail online, which gives a very limited way to set rules but just barely good enough for these rare occasions.

No more of your filters. But your mail host is still filtering out things and deciding which emails you will see and which you will not. Even freedom loving Proton mail does it. Gmail and MSOffice365 are terrible about silently dropping legitimate emails.

It's not easy to set up but a personal mailserver is the only way to know you'll actually receive mail people send you. Getting other mailservers to accept your mail is different and harder problem, of course.

I recently decided to keep my email filters, because they're still working for me.

On my personal laptop, which folder of mine an incoming email lands in:

* Trash -- All those "new device" emails that sites have started sending every time I log in from the same IP address as always, because I don't preserve their cookies (congrats, you've made security worse), plus Fedex (who won't let me unubscribe from marketing emails). I might look at this every few weeks, briefly.

* Junk -- Detected spam by my email hoster, plus emails from people not in my addressbook (with a few exclusions, such as for certain domains). I have to check this folder every couple days, briefly.

* Lower -- Emails matching large list of rules for senders/subjects I know I don't see soon as they arrive, but will check this folder at least once a day.

* Inbox -- Everything remaining after the rules applied, which is generally emails from people I know, and things I know I want to see promptly, and new unknown stuff from addresses in my addressbook (of 11K entries). This is the only folder that triggers any kind of notification to me, and it's a fairly low-disruption notification.

That's for personal. My work email setups vary by employer/client, but I always get notifications of emails by default from anyone in the company, partners, customers, etc., so I can be responsive. Then slowly add rules to exclude notifications from those of employer/client/partner/customer things that you know don't need prompt attention (like a noisy SaaS announcing every change in a high-traffic repo or wiki).

Most email strategies I read about, assume some premises that don't apply to me:

- Web mail

- IMAP

- Phone

In this case, trying to apply TFA to my job is also impossible, since the article implies that I can unsubscribe from the dozens of notifications someone thought it was a good idea to CC the whole department. Thanks God for filters!

At home I do filter too, sometimes I've found useful stuff in 20 y.o. messages. Of course, YMMV.

No, you gotta keep at least the X-Phishtest filter (or whatever vendor your company uses for stupid phishtests), at a minimum.

I had a similar revelation. But I went a slightly different direction with it. I have filters for anything that I anticipate getting but I know isn't urgent. All those filters do the same thing, which is "Skip the Inbox/Archive", but leave as unread. Every couple days I go through them on my computer where I can cycle through them with a single keystroke per email.

So I think of it as a 2 inbox system. The regular inbox is known important or unanticipated emails. Searching for `is:unread` gives the non-urgent stuff.

An important part of this is the keystrokes. I start from the oldest and just cycle through. No real action or decision needs to be made on the majority of emails.

This is the way.

Search basically nullifies the need to organize/group messages in subfolders. I practice similar email hygiene as the author; everything goes through the mental flow chart:

Does this need to be worked? Keep in Inbox. Otherwise…

Does this need to be saved? Archive.

Else? Unsubscribe and/or Delete

both at work and my personal emails have been at good unread counts for the past decade (at most double digits on hectic times or vacation). at first i would use a lot of filters at work (especially for the automated reporting mails made by apps and ci/cd pipelines, but also for types of senders, etc.).

lately i am down to just a combination of using flags and a limited set of filters for only my personal email. i have attacked the problem at the source, just like the OP. switched away from email reporting wherever possible and unsubscribed to as many email communications for non-essential things.

from personal experience, it is hard to find certain emails even when you neatly organize into hundreds of folders, because mobile apps only cache the first few emails anyways. so when you really need to find something, you might as well end up searching by text. just keep going through the emails and delete the ones which already has the same information elsewhere (like those reminder emails). email threads also make things neat, and has reduced the visual clutter when using a mail app.

I've forgotten when, but it has been a while; I've been with just "Unread" and "Flagged," which are built-in filters of Apple Mail. The "Flagged" ones are the ones I focus on, while the "Unread" is done, forgotten, or "Flagged."

Whichever you use, invest time in learning the shortcuts, and things go pretty smoothly. My mail client is, thus, pretty clean most of the time.

https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...

> I unsubscribe to everything I do not absolutely need

I get like 500 daily messages between multiple email accounts, and this just does not scale. Some messages are needed once year, monthly, some weekly, some are fed into LLM and automation. It is very convenient to have everything organized into folders.

I really have no time, to look for some esoteric details, in some obscure report, on website that stopped working 5 years ago! I just use full text search over my local email archive!

It also keeps paper trail. If GitHub goes down, or I get fired, I still have most comments and decisions.

Without email I would start reinventing alternatives like RSS.

Since I started using imapfilter [1] on my server and „aggressive unsubscribe“, email is good again. I added a shortcut to my aerc configuration [2] which adds the sender of a selected mail to a file which imapfilter reads to move it in a folder. It’s so convenient now it can handle hundreds of mails over several mail accounts fully automated.

1: https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter

2: https://github.com/rafo/aerc-vim

There is a category of spam emails where clicking unsubscribe links ends up signaling spammers that email address is in use and leads to even more spam emails. I wish there was an option to really block such emails and not put them in spam or trash folders. Going even further, each spam email sender should be forced to make a small payment to get their spam delivered to my inbox.

Unsubscribing or blackholing works well. When I started unsubscribing, the first couple weeks were a burden, but that was so long ago. In work email, I use filters and rules and then prioritize the important/focus filter. This is easy because there are fewer senders to manage at work.

A friend taught me to create a Smart Folder in Mail to show messages in inbox that contain the string “unsubscribe”.

Then you unsubscribe.

I try to keep inbox zero, so it flags all new email that needs unsubscribing. It’s a very helpful trick.

I mostly just shuffle stuff into a folder called CanDelete.

That way it’s there if I ever need it but never see it. And maybe once a year I clean it out with a mass delete

Since when does iOS let you set up E-mail filters?

yes, this is exactly what I do. My email should be practically empty unless something is on fire.

I think this is a good choice.

Search don't sort.